US plans ‘major’ Russia sanctions package after Alexei Navalny death: White House
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is preparing to announce a “major sanctions package” against Russia later this week in response to the death of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the renewed Kremlin offensive in eastern Ukraine.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby revealed the planned punishment Tuesday — saying “it’s clear that President [Vladimir] Putin and his government are responsible for Mr. Navalny’s death,” which was announced Feb. 16.
“In response, at President Biden’s direction, we will be announcing a major sanctions package on Friday of this week to hold Russia accountable for what happened to Mr. Navalny and quite frankly, for all its actions over the course of this vicious and brutal war,” Kirby said during a call with reporters.
Biden, 81, said in 2021 that he had warned Putin there would be “devastating” consequences if Navalny died in custody, but told reporters hours after the dissident’s reported death: “That was three years ago. In the meantime, they faced a hell of a lot of consequences.”
The Russian government said that Navalny, 47, who previously survived a 2020 poisoning via a nerve agent that was believed to be a prior Kremlin plot, felt unwell, collapsed and died after a walk at the Arctic prison where he was being held.
Biden confirmed plans for new sanctions Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters as he departed the White House for a three-day fundraising tour of California that “I told you we’d be announcing sanctions on Russia. We’ll have a major package announced on Friday, and I’ll be happy to sit with you all while doing that.”
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US will unveil “a substantial package covering a range of different elements of the Russian defense industrial base and sources of revenue for the Russian economy.”
“This is another turn of the crank, another turn of the wheel, and it is a range of targets — a significant range of targets that we have worked persistently and diligently to identify to continue to impose costs for what Russia has done — for what it’s done to Navalny, for what it’s done to Ukraine and for the threat that it represents to international peace and security,” Sullivan said on his own press call Tuesday afternoon.
The democracy advocate died months after another Putin adversary, the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, perished in a fiery August plane crash in a suspected assassination outside Moscow. Two months earlier, Prigozhin had organized a brief mutiny against Putin’s government and advanced with his Wagner Group fighters toward the Russian capital.
The White House has gradually increased sanctions on Russian officials and associated businesspeople since the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 — after Biden also warned of dire consequences if Putin proceeded with an anticipated attack.
“He’s never seen sanctions like the ones I promised will be imposed if he moves,” Biden similarly threatened at a press conference shortly before the invasion.
At the same press conference, Biden said the NATO response would be unclear if there was only a “minor incursion” by Russia, horrifying Kyiv officials who said the remark gave Putin a “green light” to attack.
So far, a pair of Russian billionaires associated with Biden family business ventures have been left off the growing sanctions list.
Real estate titan Yelena Baturina, the widow of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkow, allegedly dined with then-Vice President Joe Biden at least once and possibly twice in 2014 and 2015 — after transferring $3.5 million to an account controlled by his son Hunter Biden and Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer.
Archer said in a House deposition in July that Baturina’s firm Inteco separately invested nearly $120 million with his company Rosemont Realty, with which Hunter Biden also was briefly associated.
Another Russian billionaire, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, confirmed in 2022 that he met with Hunter Biden about possible real estate investments in 2012 while his dad was vice president. Records from Hunter’s abandoned laptop indicate they were due to meet again in 2013 at DC’s Café Milano — the same venue where Joe Biden twice joined gatherings of his son’s Eastern European and Central Asian partners.
A source told The Post that Yevtushenkov, whose Sistema business empire until recently included Russian rocket and radar maker RTI and military drone maker Kronstadt, explicitly courted the then-second son for potential favor from the US government.
“I asked [Yevtushenkov], ‘Why are you doing this?’ on the front end — before I understood that they were going to buy some real estate,” the source said. “He made it very clear to me that, you know … ‘I think it would be good to have a good relationship with this guy … maybe he can do a favor for us and we can do a favor for him,’ It was a complete quid pro quo that he was going in for.”
“I told him that’s not the way it works in America, [but] he basically laughed at me and told me I was so naïve,” the source recalled.
